This course will teach you about:
- Short/long-term futures thinking – and why you need to think about both
- The various foresight elements and their differences
- Predictive/exploratory foresight tools – and their various purposes
- Quantitative/qualitative answers – and what data can and can’t tell you
- Trends – when and what happens when trends bend
Mindset work, like any other skill, requires practice to build up your expertise. We will give you some tools to help you identify and understand how to use foresight and examples of when it could be useful to you in your work, career and life contexts. We will give you exercises that will help you to increase your:
- agency in the face of VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) change
- confidence to understand better what is going on ‘out there’
- understanding of the value and limitations of foresight
- ability to gather useful context-specific intelligence
- awareness of how your decisions today create the future you’ll deal with tomorrow, and therefore the value of rehearsing your options strategically
This is for you if you:
- Want to bring futures thinking and foresight into your life, work and career
- Want to understand the different foresight tools available and when they work/don’t work
- Want to think more strategically and long-term
- Feel your organisation is stuck and needs to look differently at the future
- Think you want to develop a new skillset
WHAT THE EXPERTS ARE SAYING
- The Citi Report Technology at Work v4.0: Navigating the Future of Work informed us of the importance of embracing the notion that “there will be constant change across every facet of life”. Their advice was the following: “It is important to be future-oriented and to work out concepts and visions”.
- “Futures Literacy addresses the urgent need to transform human governance by empowering everyone to use-the-future more effectively and efficiently. It is about moving beyond a dependency on the illusion of certainty and the fragilities this creates.” according to UNESCO’s Futures Literacy
- William Gibson, American author, wrote in the Economist in December 2003: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.“ The faint signals of tomorrow are all around us and the question is whether we choose to notice them.
What will you walk away with?
- An overview of the different forms of foresight and the different ways in which foresight can be applied in your work, career or life, together with examples about how they are used
- An understanding of how to use the future in different contexts
- Tools to start using right away – and knowledge of which works best when
- TAKE HOME PACK with summary and set of references and further reading to continue your futurist journey
After this course you will:
- Feel more confident about the future and how it is unfolding
- Be more observant of the changes taking place around you
- Have more understanding of the value and limitations of different foresight tools
- Have more insights about how to gather useful context-specific intelligence
- Be more conscious of how your decisions today create the future you or your work will deal with tomorrow, and therefore the value of rehearsing your options strategically
…so that you can
- Recognise changing circumstances before they unfold
- Ask the critical contextual questions
- Rehearse the future
- Think more strategically
- Notice faint signals of tomorrow
